Vaccine can mend a broken spine

Vithal C Nadkarni, TNNAug 24, 2006, 01.01am IST

The astrophysicist Fred Hoyle once said that theories in science that come roaring like lions, have to sometimes retreat, bleating like lambs. That makes science different from superstition, which places belief beyond doubt and fallibility. In practice however, scientists can sometimes be pretty dogmatic too.

Consider the notorious example of the Austrian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. He discovered the secret of septic fever in 1841, 30 years before the 'germ theory' became established, and was able to save young mothers from dying of infection from their doctors' hands.

Instead of being greeted as a hero, Mr Semmelweis ended up in an insane asylum and died there — his hide-bound colleagues refused to change their old ways. Similar hostility to revolutionary ideas was witnessed when psycho-neuro-immunology (PNI) was first discovered in the 1970s.

For a long time, the old guard refused to buy the findings which showed an unexpected mood-body connection, when scientists found a novel immunological loop between the brain and the body mediated by neuro-chemicals.

Also, Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute were initially booed when they challenged the 100-year-old dogma of irreversible brain cell decline. Gage had to wait for nearly a decade before his findings of a 'plastic brain,' in which neurons kept regenerating right until a person's death finally moved from the fringe to the mainstream.

Ditto the discovery of the viral prion molecule that reproduced without conventional DNA mechanism. Hooted at and derided initially, the discoverer of the prion, Stanley Prusiner later got the Nobel Prize for medicine. So don't knock 'self-correcting' science too much: with apologies to Hindi bards, in the durbar of science there may be 'der' (delay) but never 'andher' (perpetual darkness).

The newest case to ruffle tradition's feathers involves a vaccination that's supposed to stimulate production of immune cells. This could be the revolutionary key to enabling people with serious spinal injuries (such as the late Superman Christopher Reeve) to walk again, researchers say.

Predictably, some neurologists are sceptical about the findings. The controversial research claims have been made by a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who say that key immune cells can work with stem cells to mend broken spines in mice. Their latest study led by Michal Schwartz involved a vaccine that increased the numbers of immune cells, known as T-helper cells that specifically protect a protein called myelin that coats nerve cells.

The vaccine encouraged and protected stem-cells in the spine as they grew and become nerve cells, to such an extent that previously crippled animals were able to resume walking, they say. However, the new claims have reignited a major controversy in neuroscience. Traditional theory suggests that the delicate central nervous system needs to be isolated from the heavy-handed cells of the immune system in order to function properly and affect repairs.

Ms. Schwartz has spent the last 10 years working on a different theory: that a significant degree of immune system involvement is needed for the central nervous system to repair itself. To be sure, some other scientists, less critical of Ms Schwartz's claims, described them as 'encouraging' and called for more substantial animal research to be done before tests on humans are even contemplated. Superman Reeve, are you listening up there?